Eudora Welty

The story and its analyses are not mirror-opposites of each
other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed
is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree
a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what the
writer is learning to do.

Eudora Welty, "On
Writing"

At the center of Eudora
Weltys first published story, “Death of a Traveling
Salesman,” Bowman, the bachelor businessman, suddenly understands
both his years of loneliness and the relationship between the older
man and the girl who have rescued him from his wrecked car. He sees
there: “A marriage, a fruitful marriage. That simple thing.
Anyone could have had that.” This crucial moment augurs the
“fruitful” subject that permeates Weltys fiction:
the intimate and often strange relationships within families. Welty
is the twentieth-century master of her subject, and the centurys
most gifted and radical practitioner of the short story. She won
most of the major literary prizes during her career, including the
Pulitzer Prize and the French Légion dHonneur. Only
the Nobel Prize eluded her, and many believe this to be one of that
committees great oversights. Even a generic description of
Weltys oeuvre—four collections of stories, five novels,
two collections of photographs, three works of non-fiction (essay,
memoir, book review), and one childrens book—shows Weltys
wide scope as an artist, and reading through her work reveals an
astonishing tonal range in subject and style, the most expansive
of any twentieth-century American writer.

The simple facts of Eudora Weltys
life, however, obscure for some readers her radical experiments
in subject and form. Those facts are well known from essays and
interviews published throughout her life and from Weltys best-selling
account of her writing life, One Writers Beginnings
(1983). Born April 13, 1909, Welty spent what she describes as an
idyllic childhood in Jackson, Mississippi with her two brothers,
Edward and Walter, and their doting parents, Chestina, a schoolteacher,
and Christian, an insurance executive. Welty lived in her familial
homes in Jackson for most of her ninety-two years—one, on
Congress Avenue near the center of town (she walked through the
state Capitol on her way to grammar school), and a second on Pinehurst
Street, where she lived until her death in 2001. Sojourns from Jackson
included two years at Mississippi State College for Women (1925-27),
several years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and a year
in New York City, studying advertising at the Columbia University
business school. Her fathers untimely death in 1931 brought
her home from New York, and she worked at a local radio station
and wrote about the Jackson social scene for the Memphis, Tennessee,
Commercial Appeal, a newspaper circulated throughout Northwest
Mississippi. From 1933-36 she served as a publicity agent for the
Works Progress Administration throughout rural Mississippi, where
she also took her most memorable photographs (published in 1989).
She began to publish fiction in 1936, was on staff of the New
York Times Book Review in 1944, and traveled to France, Italy,
England and Ireland in 1949-50, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship.
During her writing life she held extended residences at a number
of universities, including Oxford and Cambridge (she was the first
woman to enter Peterhouse College).

Weltys education and employment
history indicate her comfort in a variety of places and situations.
Yet she consistently anchored herself in Jackson, coming home for
good to nurse her ailing mother in the 1960s. Along with Weltys
artful gentility and modesty, this idea of the single southern woman
spending most of her adult life in her childhood home has mislead
some critics into assuming that Welty is little more than a “literary
aunt” addressing only polite subjects in her work. Further,
anecdotes about Weltys “niceness” abound in print,
especially in her obituaries, and these stories add to the image
of the benign Welty. At her funeral in July 2001, for example, Weltys
agent Timothy Seldes reported that he had heard that Welty spoke
her last words to a doctor who leaned over her bed and asked, “Eudora,
is there anything I can do for you?” Her rumored reply: “No,
but thank you so much for inviting me to the party.” As this
apocryphal story illustrates, the public Welty was genteel, always
humble, always ready to make those around her comfortable. Welty
was widely and deeply loved in her region, and the idea of her taking
such an exit from life, as if she were one of many guests at a dinner
party, epitomizes her generous presence there. These stories, however,
present a carefully crafted persona, and readers unfamiliar with
the coded language of southern gentility persist in misreading Weltys
work through a one-dimensional version of her life as a southern
charmer. A New York Times interviewer, more interested
in Welty’s personal life than her work, inquired about marriage.
Artfully deflecting the question, Welty
replied that marriage, “never came up.”[1]
Such inquiries do little to open the rich ground of Welty’s
fiction.

Some recent criticism
about Welty’s work has begun to challenge the established view of
her as a modest and politically simple writer.[2] Indeed, Welty’s work embodies sophistication on many fronts.
Welty’s father, Christian, and his fascination with machines of
all sorts gave Welty her intense concentration upon time and clocks,
on travel, on telescopes and cameras. The camera that her father
would bring out to record all special occasions gave Welty her visual
sense and love of photography. Photography has a profound influence
on Welty’s mode of writing, teaching her that “Life doesn’t hold
still,” as she explains in One Writer’s Beginnings. “Photography
taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready
to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need
I had” (OWB 84). Welty’s formal career as a photographer
never really materialized, though two exhibitions of her photographs
were mounted in New York, and five selections from her photographs
have been published to date, most notably: One Time, One
Place (1978) and Photographs (1989). These collections
are beginning to receive international attention from critics in
the visual arts, and several exhibitions of her work have been mounted
since her death. As she explains her choice of
vocation, she tells us that she “felt the need to hold transient
life in words—there’s so much more of life that only words can convey....
The direction my mind took was a writer’s direction from the start”
(OWB 85).[3] Yet while Welty obviously
did feel her primary medium to be language, she did not hold photography
in abeyance, but continued to use a camera until 1950, when she
left her Rolleiflex on a bench in the Paris Metro, and out of anger
at her own carelessness, did not replace it.

Welty’s first collection of stories,
A Curtain of Green (1941), enlivens the images that Welty stored
in her imagination as she traveled across rural Mississippi as a
junior publicity agent for the WPA from 1933-36. Among these stories:
“The Whistle,” based upon, as Welty explains, a warning of early
frost that brought out a beggar’s ransom of clothing, bedding, and
floor coverings, to protect the crops against the freeze; “Lily
Daw and the Three Ladies,” “A Piece of News,” and “Petrified Man,”
all extended riffs upon the alarm and subtlety with which small-town
eccentrics might approach the dangers and fascination of illicit
sexuality; “Clytie” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” both depicting
the solitary, eccentric young woman in a small town setting, bereft
of companions who might buffer her oddness. Prior to the publication
of this first book, in 1936 Welty mounted a photographic exhibition
in New York, and published her first story, “Death of a Traveling
Salesman,” in the literary magazine, Manuscript. The story
uses a series of frames to depict the last hours of a salesman,
who wrecks his car near a young married couple’s shotgun shack.
The center of the various frames in the story turns out to be the
marriage bed, the symbol of the couple’s relationship, as well as
of the relationships that eluded the salesman. “Death of a Traveling
Salesman” establishes both the photographic technique and the subject
matter that would become the foundation not only for A Curtain
of Green, but also for all of Eudora Welty’s work. In her description
of writing the story, she connects photographic narrative technique
with her subject, relationships:

As usual, I began writing from a distance, but “Death of a Traveling
Salesman” led me closer. It drew me toward what was at the center
of it.... In writing the story I approached [the cabin] and went
inside with my traveling salesman, and had him ... figure out
what was there.... ‘A marriage, a fruitful marriage. That simple
thing.’ Writing “Death of a Traveling Salesman” opened my eyes.
And I had received the shock of having touched, for the first
time, on my real subject: human relationships. (OWB 87)

Welty’s “real subject” was apparent to some critics at the publication
of A Curtain of Green. These same critics, however, were
surprised at Welty’s next book, The Robber Bridegroom, and
its apparent release of that subject.

Eudora Welty was born in this house on North Congress Street
in Jackson, near the Mississippi state capitol. A plaque notes that
many of the events depicted in One Writer's Beginnings took
place in this house. The house was purchased in 1979 and restored
for use as office space. Click for larger
view

Eudora Welty Collection,
Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History

This photograph,
"Tomato-packers' recess," is one of the photographs Eudora Welty
took during the Great Depression as a publicity agent for the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) in the mid-1930s. Click
for larger view

Weltys
photographs were exhibited in Rennes, France, in 2002.

The Robber Bridegroom
(1946), Welty’s fairy tale set on the Natchez Trace, spins the story
of a highwayman, Jamie Lockhart, who masquerades part-time as a
gentleman. He kidnaps a planter’s daughter, and she falls in love
with the thief, whom her father knows only as a gentleman. The tale
has plenty of indigenous horrors taken from the history of the Trace—wild
creatures and men of various states of savagery—but Welty cut her
teeth on Grimm’s Fairy Tales, so it should come as no surprise
that she injects some of Grimm’s gothic horror into the tale as
well. The Robber Bridegroom contains all of the virtues of
a good fairy tale: mystery, magic, poetic description, and in general
a sense of the inexplicable. What the tale lacks, surprisingly given
the introspection of A Curtain of Green, is any psychological
exploration of Jamie Lockhart and his need/desire to be both robber
and gentleman, or of Rosamond’s relationships with her family, not
to mention with the highwayman. Understanding Welty’s primary subject
as relationships, attentive readers of A Curtain of Green
found her circumscribing such issues in her second book odd.

Welty’s opus contains several other
works that defy the genre that she sets up for herself as she describes
coming to her real subject in writing “Death of a Traveling Salesman.”
The Ponder Heart, for instance, seems to be more akin to
comedy and farce than to anything else in Welty, with the exception
perhaps of the story “Why I Live at the P.O,” Sister’s long rant
in high comic mode—when Stella Rondo runs off with Sister’s boyfriend,
Mr. Whitaker, and returns home two years later with a two-year-old
and an attitude, Sister moves in protest to the post office, where
she is post mistress. Edna Earl Ponder of The Ponder Heart
in many ways is the natural descendant of Sister, telling her story
to a captive traveling salesman who stays in her hotel. As with
Sister’s narrative, Edna Earle’s stories about her Uncle Daniel
leave the reader wondering exactly who in the family is sane, if
anyone.

This high-comic genre
in Welty finds its endpoint with the long novel, Losing Battles.
Welty notes that the novel, portraying two days in the community
of Banner in northeast Mississippi, remains the most difficult undertaking
in her career. The long novel—436 pages—is almost entirely dramatic,
filled with dialogue and interchange among the members of Granny
Vaughn’s family gathered to celebrate her 90th birthday. For a writer
with professed interests in human relationships and with proven
and profound abilities to represent interior life with subtlety,
indirection, and complexity, taking the time and effort to write
such a novel seems, at first blush, inexplicable. Indeed, the entire
lineage of Losing Battles—“Why I Live at the P.O.,” The
Robber Bridegroom, and The Ponder Heart—does not follow
the pattern that Welty sets for herself initially.

One key to reading these works within
the Welty canon, however, lies in the chapter of One Writer’s
Beginnings entitled “Listening.” Welty describes herself as
a child climbing into the back set of the family car and announcing
to the other passengers as the trip commences, “Now talk!” Her first
impulse was to listen, in other words, to hear a story. “Listening”
and “Finding a Voice” form the bookend chapters for the central
chapter, “Learning to See,” in Welty’s autobiography, and while
observation certainly forms the core of Welty’s gift, these two
ancillary abilities reign supreme in the comic Welty. Welty, without
the brilliant ear for dialogue and the virtuosic ventriloquism,
would bring far less to her readers. Readers who find themselves
more drawn to the oblique, introspective Welty, must concede that
Welty’s tonal range is one of the most extraordinary in all of fiction.
And those readers must also concede that these comic novels and
stories are gut-bustingly funny.

Her talent for comedy aside, the
most surprising gift that Welty has offered her readers, and the
text that speaks most directly about her work as a writer, came
to fruition in 1983, when Welty agreed to deliver the first annual
Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard
University. Those attending these three afternoon lectures sat in
a packed hall—some in window sills—listening to Welty’s “continuous
thread of revelation” as she traced her upbringing and meditated
upon the forces, both familial and situational, that shaped her
as a writer and as a person. These three lectures became her best
selling volume, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984). Apart from
this book, Welty has remained notoriously taciturn about her life,
instructing her friends to do the same. When asked in 1989 about
how she would explain her work, she responded that she would offer
no such explanation, that she wanted “the work to exist as the thing
that answers every question about its doing.” This position establishes
careful boundaries around what we can and cannot know about Welty,
and consequently, also delimits how we may discuss her work in conjunction
with her life. Welty has been remarkably influential at setting
the terms for understanding her work: one despairing comment about
the feminist movement, for example, delayed feminist readings of
her work for twenty or thirty years. A recent biography of Welty
by Anne Waldrop not only is unauthorized by Welty, but also was
actively blocked and discouraged by Welty. Critical enrichment and
revaluation of Welty’s work is difficult without such sources as
letters, interviews with close friends, and so forth, and is, some
might argue, merely speculative. In the absence of such material,
Welty’s critics have concentrated on her public persona as a point
of entry into her work. Welty has had extraordinary control of this
persona, and this control has at times led to a narrow reading of
her work.

Welty writes that there is “no explanation
outside fiction” for her stories; they are gifts from the writer.
She continues,

It is not from criticism but from this world that stories come
in the beginning; their origins are living reference plain to
the writer’s eye, even though to his eye alone. The writer’s mind
and heart, where all this exterior is continually becoming something—the
moral, the passionate, the poetic, hence the shaping idea—can’t
be mapped and plotted. (Eye, p. 109)

One way to read this
caveat is as Welty’s response to those critics who would take her
“life” and try to fold it back into her work. As the quotation intimates,
Welty has written insightful and well-placed essays on technique
in her stories—not that she has exhausted the subject—she has, rather,
given the critic an abundance of material to work with. The Eye
of the Story (1979) and One Writer’s Beginnings (1984),
along with the essay prefacing her collected photographs, and A
Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews (1994) comprise Welty’s
published non-fiction to date. While one job of the critic is, as
Welty suggests, to consider the stories as “visions,” as absolute
works of art, in order to elaborate upon the technique that fosters
them, another job of the critic also entails linking the writer’s
vision with her socio-cultural place in the world. By controlling
her public persona so carefully, and by firmly insisting that her
work is not political, Welty maintains for her work an anonymity
among writers whom critics see as trying to change the world in
which they live. Even in her autobiographical work, One Writer’s
Beginnings, Welty does not discuss social or cultural issues
outside of those endemic to the immediate family. In
all of her non-fictional writing, and in her interviews, Welty attempts
to focus critical attention upon some aspects of her technique and
upon circumscribed social issues of community and the family, all
aspects of her work that she is comfortable writing and talking
about.[4]

Whatever opinions readers might
harbor concerning Welty’s stance towards biography, we must concede
that her admonition to read what she has written extends excellent
advice. Welty’s best work is among the best work of any writer in
the twentieth century. The two volume Library of America
edition attests as much; Welty was the only living writer to be
granted a place in the series. This set collects all of Welty’s
novels:, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Delta Wedding
(1946),The Ponder Heart (!954), Losing Battles (1970),
and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972); as well as the collections
of stories: A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net and
Other Stories (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The
Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955); two uncollected
stories—“Where is This Voice Coming From,” and “The Demonstrators”—and
two works of non-fiction, The Eye of the Story (1978) and
One Writer’s Beginnings (1984). Sitting down with these books,
reading them straight through, offers not only a panorama of Welty’s
extraordinary vision, but also gives the sense, as Welty herself
said upon reading The Collected Stories (1980), of “watching
a negative develop, slowly coming clear before your eyes.”

As anyone working
in a darkroom knows, there are many levels of exposure, and the
rightness of a print’s saturation depends upon the viewer. For me,
Welty’s vision burns in perfectly in her collection of interlocking
short stories, The Golden Apples. Neither short fiction nor
novel, strictly speaking, this book brings to fruition the subject
Welty meditated upon in her previous collections of stories. As
works depicting the sheltered individual within a closed community,
both A Curtain of Green and A Wide Net augur the subject
matter of The Golden Apples. Set in the community of Morgana,
the individual stories focus on different members of the community.
This technique offers a prismatic view of Welty’s experimenting
with her subject of relationships, the relation of self to family
and community. Just as the longer stories of A Wide Net represent
a deepening of Welty’s concerns with the drama of the isolated life
that she initiated in A Curtain of Green, the interconnected
stories of The Golden Apples show Welty broadening these
concerns. No longer are we in a singular situation, seeing only
one brief span of a life from a single point of view; these stories
allow us, and the characters, breathing space. We begin to see how
different individuals may cope with isolation both over a span of
time, and within a slightly larger community.

As in the stories of her previous
two collections, some individuals in Morgana fare better under the
protective umbrella of a close family or community than do others.
Welty lists the “main families” of Morgana as a preface to the book,
inviting us to consider individuals within families, and families
within communities. We read first about the MacLains and the Raineys,
in “A Shower of Gold”; then “June Recital” features the Raineys,
the Morrisons, and Miss Eckhart and her mother. When we look back
at the list after reading these two stories, to situate ourselves
more securely in Morgana, we see that Miss Eckhart and her mother
are not on the list. Miss Eckhart is not “from” Morgana, nor would
she and her mother be considered a proper family by native Morganans,
much less one of the “main families.” In other words, even before
we read a word of The Golden Apples, we can discern from
this list the clannish nature of the town, and the provincial way
that it views family and community. We may also discern from this
list and its omissions an indication of narrative distance in
The Golden Apples. By omitting Miss Eckhart, arguably the central
character in the work, from the list of Morgana’s “main” families,
the narrator indicates a slightly ironic stance that will last throughout
the book. The narrator may represent something that is “true” within
the framework of Morgana, but then she may also step back, and show
us another “truth,” one that lies outside the framework of Morgana.
Miss Eckhart is not “main,” from the point of view of the characters
enclosed within the narrow world of Morgana, though she certainly
is a central figure if we look at Morgana from the position that
the narrator gives us. Once again, we see Welty’s emphasis on visual
framing, the technique she introduces in “Death of a Traveling Salesman.”

Merely by her singular
existence, Miss Eckhart challenges the prevailing ways that Morganans
live. But whether or not Miss Eckhart’s way of living is an alternative
model to the potential for claustrophobia within family and community,
Welty leaves open. On one hand, Miss Eckhart’s life seems ideal.
She is free to follow her own passion and art, and as the town’s
piano teacher she shepherds most of the children through their beginning
and intermediate keyboard repertoire. Thus as a music teacher, she
has the pleasure of her music and the added pleasure of being with
children. On the other hand, Miss Eckhart does not seem happy or
at peace with her life. When one of her pupils, Cassie Morrison,
reflects in “June Recital” upon Miss Eckhart and her legacy, she
reports various rumors about Miss Eckhart’s failed relationships.
It is rumored that “She had been sweet on Mr. Hal Sissum, who clerked
in the shoe department of Spights’ store” (CS 296). As far as Cassie
knows, the two never even dated. When Mr. Sissum drowns, Miss Eckhart
“would have gone headlong into the red clay hole” (CS 299) of his
grave if the minister hadn’t grabbed her. This silent but powerful
outpouring of grief suggests that Miss Eckhart harbors an equally
powerful feeling for Mr. Sissum; she may, after all, wish to have
a family, to “fit it” into Morgana. Mr. Sissum’s death slams the
door on this possibility.

Miss Eckhart lives alone with her
mother. After the funeral, we begin to realize what an unhappy life
Miss Eckhart leads, from the devastating sadness of the narrator’s
comment that Miss Eckhart is “a poor unwanted teacher and unmarried....
Of course her only associates from first to last were children;
not counting Miss Snowdie” (her landlord; CS 306-07). Cassie
reports seeing her slap her mother viciously, and “Then stories
began to be told of what Miss Eckhart had really done to her old
mother.... Some people said Miss Eckhart killed her mother with
opium” (CS 307). Whether or not these rumors are true, they
offer a glimpse into the kind of atmosphere in which Miss Eckhart
exists in Morgana. The community is not kind to her, and Cassie
concludes that “Her love never did anybody any good” (CS
307). What seems on the surface to be a potentially enriching life
of following one’s artistic passion and passing that passion on
to the young, becomes in the fishbowl of Morgana just as devastating
an experience for Miss Eckhart as for any other Welty character
caught within a closely-guarded family. Miss Eckhart dies alone
in a mental institution in Jackson, which reminds us of Lily Daw,
en route to a mental institution until her suspect husband-to-be
arrives at the train station and plucks her off the train. If we
look only to Miss Eckhart, Lily Daw, and characters like them, the
choice for a life within a sheltering community—the very life that
Welty herself led—seems to be no choice at all: either marriage
or a mental ward.

Other individuals in The Golden
Apples seem to survive the rigors of the intensely sheltered,
myopic community better than Miss Eckhart, and give us a different
view of community. Yet these are all members of the youngest generation
of Morganans, and we are not shown in The Golden Apples how
their lives will play out. Both Loch and Cassie Morrison early on
thrive on their Morgana upbringing. As we see them in “June Recital”
and in “Moon Lake,” each exudes in youth a level-headedness and
balance of spirit that is rare in a Welty character. As a young
adult, Loch leaves Morgana for New York, presumably for a contented
life: “He likes it there,” Cassie says. Loch’s sister, however,
stays in Morgana, teaching piano and obsessing over the suicide
of her mother, (she plants hyacinth bulbs in a pattern that spells
out her mother’s name), not as “happy” as her brother.

Unlike Loch and Cassie, Cassie’s
friend Virgie Rainey has struggled under the scrutiny of Morgana.
Her family is so poor that her mother dyes shoe strings with pokeberry
juice to fashion for her a laced up collar like the one on the latest
store-bought sailor blouse. All the town girls make fun of her poverty.
Virgie also struggles within her family; her independent spirit
allows her musical ability to shine—she is Miss Eckhart’s star pupil—yet
music and the arts are totally beyond her family’s grasp. The goats
are allowed into the parlor in the Rainey house, where they snack
on Virgie’s old practice piano.

The final story in The Golden
Apples finds Virgie confronting her mother’s death, and with
this death, Virgie breaks all ties to family and community. At her
mother’s funerary viewing, Morgana tries to reach out to Virgie,
but “They were all people who had never touched her before who tried
now to struggle with her, their faces hurt. She was hurting them
all, shocking them” (CS 435). She packs up her mother’s house,
sells the cattle, and readies to leave Morgana. Cassie connects
Virgie with Loch: “‘You’ll go away like Loch ... A life of your
own, away—I’m so glad for people like you and Loch, I am really’“
(CS 457). For Cassie, the focus of Loch and Virgie’s future
is on the individual’s ability to control or “own” her own life,
and to lead that life “away.” These are things, it seems, that Cassie
cannot now do in Morgana. With Virgie, Welty suggests for the first
time in her stories, that something unmitigatingly “bright” can
come out of isolation for one who understands the narrowness of
small town life, and who suffers its shackles. Welty leaves open
the possibility for Virgie and for Loch that the sheltered, isolated
life they have known in Morgana, with its magnified attention to
the individual, has prepared them to go out in the world. Perhaps
there can be, after all, some redemption from the insular life;
the scrutiny that the small town places on the individual can, it
seems, give one an impression of one’s own importance and the confidence
that accompanies such importance.

With Virgie, Welty shows us that
it is possible that the kind of life Morgana offers can also foster
a rich and perceptive inner life. The pressures that townspeople
and family have placed upon Virgie Rainey seem in the end to act
on her as pressure and heat act upon coal: they form a diamond.
The images in the final sections of “The Wanderer” all suggest that
with the death of her mother, Virgie is able to release some of
the anger and resentment that have built up in her: “like suggestions
and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering
and losing itself.... the vanishing opacity of her will.... in the
next moment she might turn into something without feeling it shock
her.... As though for a long time she had been extremely angry”
(CS 440-41). Living in a sheltered environment, as Welty
indicates, can be lovely in its protective shell, but that shell
can also press and retain heat. For some—Miss Eckhart, Cassie and
her mother—this pressure causes a breakdown. Virgie, though, seems
to emerge from the intensity of her environment poised with self-knowledge.
In the end, she asks herself “Could she ever be, would she be, where
she was going?” (CS 459). All signals suggest that she will
come into herself, for in the final sentences of the story, Virgie
sits alone in the town square with an old beggar woman and nothing
to her name—these very facts would be anathema to Morgana wags—yet
she hears “the world beating” in her ears. Not only does Virgie
show her self-confidence, sitting in the wrong place with the wrong
person and with the wrong trappings of social status, but she simultaneously
shows that she is full of knowledge and creativity as well. The
world that she hears “beating” is a world of myth and imagination:
“The horse and bear, the stroke of the leopard, the dragon’s crusty
slither, and the glimmer and the trumpet of the swan” (CS 461).
These have nothing to do with Morgana or with the Mississippi countryside;
they are purely the stuff of myth, awaiting Virgie’s fashioning.
We leave Virgie in full possession of her self, negating all that
the shelter of Morgana has offered, perhaps, but also flourishing
out of the strength that she has built up in defiance of Morgana’s
probing and pressure. We suspect that Virgie will find her way through
the kind of situations that damaged Jenny in “At the Landing,” the
haunting account of a gang rape in The Wide Net. We have
seen already Virgie’s resolve and defiance in the face of the taunting
of Morganans; we have seen her intense understanding of music, with
its passions and disappointments.

With the stories
of The Golden Apples, Welty is not only able to suggest a
bright light at the end of Virgie Rainey’s insular life, but she
is also able to intensify her scrutiny of the sheltered individual,
if for no other reason than the interlocking stories allow a revisitation
of characters at various stages in their lives. In all three books,
protection of the individual can result in harm, or at least in
a static condition in which certain personalities—Livvie, Cassie
Morrison, Lily Daw, for instance—can move only from one circumstance
of protection to another. Jenny, the victim of gang rape in “At
the Landing,” is certainly Welty’s most memorable character of this
type, though The Golden Apples presents several characters
who try to leave Morgana, or try to exist outside of the social
system, but cannot. The MacLain twins, Ran and Eugene, each flee
Morgana—Ran leaves his wife and tries to live alone; Eugene moves
to San Francisco where he, too, is in a troubled marriage—but in
the end, both return to home base, in states of defeat. Ran goes
back to his wife, even though she does not love him; Eugene leaves
San Francisco and his wife to return to his family in Morgana, where
he dies. The sustained quality of The Golden Apples allows
Welty to show the effects of a sheltered life over the course of
a lifetime; significantly, she chooses to explore the “dark” side.
Nevertheless, Virgie Rainey, the most convincing example of the
“bright” side, the one who seems to profit from her experience,
is left at the end of The Golden Apples on the brink of her
life. Welty’s emphasis here is upon Virgie’s victory over her experience,
rather than upon Virgie’s experience in Morgana.

Welty’s short story collections
are autonomous and beautiful works, yet each volume also suggests
connections to the other volumes. Each collection both is an individual
project, questioning and reflecting its own emotional place, and
each collection also points toward its successor. With her final
collection, The Bride of the Innisfallen, Welty follows the
pattern that she establishes in A Curtain of Green and The
Wide Net, and codifies in The Golden Apples. A writer
often begins her career with a set of questions about a subject,
and in the course of examining these questions, deepens them. We
can look at the connections among these books in terms of Welty’s
developing sophistication as she weighs the benefits against the
perils of shelter. Or to recall the terms with which she ends One
Writer’s Beginnings, Welty asks with increasing intensity “can
the sheltered life also be a daring life?”

A Curtain of Green as a collection
is focused upon shelter as entrapment; characters in that volume
live a secluded existence, alternatives to which they cannot even
imagine. Escapes—such as they are—are all provisional, closed, unsatisfactory:
Clytie and the wife of Powerhouse’s narrative commit suicide; Sister
moves to the post office; Ruby Fisher hitchhikes to get away from
her farmhouse. The next collection, The Wide Net, presents
characters who live in similar circumstances, yet in some cases
are able to contemplate escape. Their view of the world is wide,
like Solomon’s quilt in “Livvie,” and William Wallace’s net in the
title story. The tension in these stories arises from the characters’
partial understanding of their options; they may see more of the
world within their grasp, but like the characters in A Curtain
of Green, they still cannot claim it for their own. The Golden
Apples acts out the tension between the two streams that Welty
tells us run throughout her own life, one dark and one light, with
even more intensity than either of the previous volumes. Characters
in this third book share the situation with those in previous works;
but some—Virgie, Cassie, Miss Eckhart, perhaps—seem to understand
their predicament with more subtlety. They know that shelter of
a community is at once safe and light, yet can also be smothering
and dark. By the end of The Golden Apples, Virgie Rainey
makes a true escape from this dualism by gaining self-consciousness.
The interlocking stories of The Golden Apples also allow
Welty to broaden her inquiries into the sheltered life; in Morgana
we can visit and revisit individuals as they confront the pleasures
and limitations of living under the microscope of their fellow citizens.

Eudora Welty’s short stories remain,
after many rereadings, the most rich and varied of her work, perhaps
because, as she tells us, these stories tell us everything we need
to know about Welty herself. They depict a keen observer, taking
everything in, remembering, framing, exploring the chiaroscuro of
the sheltered life lived remotely, but not without its own considerable
daring, risks, and magnificent accomplishments.

In her short story "Livvie," Welty depicted bottle-trees,
like these photographed by Welty in Simpson County. They were believed
by some to trap evil spirits Click
for larger view

In 1998 The Library of America released
two volumes of works by Welty, Eudora Welty: Complete Novels
and Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, and Memoir, making Welty
the first living author whose works have been published by the nonprofit
press.

Article Notes:

Nicholas Dawidoff, “Only the Typewriter
is Silent,” New York Times (10 August 1995): C1 and C10. Back
to text

See, for example, Eudora Welty and Politics:
Did the Writer Crusade? (Harriet Pollack and Suzanne Marrs, eds.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001) which illustrates
Welty’s subtle engagement with the politics of her time. Back
to text

Suzanne Marrs’ essay on Welty’s photographs
and photography in her The Welty Collection (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1988) details the various models of cameras that
Welty used from graduate school until 1950. Marr’s bibliography of Welty
also describes all of her negatives housed in the Mississippi State
Archives. Excellent theoretical discussion of the art of photography
appears in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: Macmillan,
1982); The Language of Images, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980); Linda Rugg’s Picturing Ourselves
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 ); and Roland Barthes’
Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981) and Image-Music-Text, Trans. Steven Heath (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977). Back to text

Welty’s “Where is This Voice Coming From”
is an interesting exception to this general rule; Welty talks about
the story (in the preface to her Collected Stories and elsewhere)
taking its generation from the murder of the civil rights activist,
Medgar Evers: “I wrote [the murderer’s] story — my fiction — in the
first person: about that character’s point of view, I felt, through
my shock and revolt, I could make no mistake” (“Preface,” p. xi). Back
to text